Elon to explain the universe

“Today we announce the formation of xAI,” said the xAI company website yesterday, “the goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. You can meet the team and ask us questions during a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.”

“Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX,” continues the site, “we have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimised Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples.”

”We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer,” adds the announcement, “we have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.

Members of the team are:

Elon Musk Igor Babuschkin
Manuel Kroiss
Yuhuai (Tony) Wu
Christian Szegedy
Jimmy Ba
Toby Pohlen
Ross Nordeen
Kyle Kosic
Greg Yang
Guodong Zhang
Zihang Dai“Join Us

The site concludes its announcement: “We are actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers to join our team as members of our technical staff in the Bay Area. Please fill out this form to apply.”

Musk personally tweeted the announcement yesterday and said that the date had been chosen in honour of one of his heroes, Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy  in which the number 42 was given by a computer to answer the question “what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.“ The numerals in yesterday’s date were 12.7.2023.

”And what are the most fundamental unknown questions?’ asked Musk in yesterday’s tweet, ‘once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part, as my hero, Douglas Adams, would say.’

Musk  registered a firm named X.AI Corp in March, incorporated in Nevada, and news about its intentions  was trailed in April when Musk was reported to have bought thousands of  Nvidia GPUs   to build a large language model capable of matching ChatGPT.

Shortly before, as if to hold back competitors while his new venture got a head start, Musk persuaded over a thousand techies to sign a letter calling for a worldwide pause on AI development.